THE

SINKING OF
THE RMS
TITANIC:
A CASE
STUDY
 INDEX

TOPICS PAGE
Acknowledgement
Introduction
Facts of the case
Historial overview
Causes of the rapid sinking
Conclusion
References
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
We would like to thank our teacher M.R. Rajat Banerjee for his constant help and
support without which it would be impossible for us to complete this project

~GROUP C

 TANISHA
BHATTACHARYYA(45
)

 ANSHUMAN
HALDER(68)

 RIDDHI ACHARYA(67)

 ATMADEEPA
DHAR(74)

 DIPTI GUPTA(70)

 SHARNA SAHA (86)

INTRODUCTION

At the time of her construction, the Titanic was the largest ship ever built.
She was nearly 900 feet long, stood 25 stories high, and weighed an
incredible 46,000 tons [Division, 1997]. With turn-of-the-century design
and technology, including sixteen major watertight compartments in her
lower section that could easily be sealed off in the event of a punctured
hull, the Titanic was deemed an unsinkable ship. According to her
builders, even in the worst possible accident at sea, two ships colliding,
the Titanic would stay afloat for two to three days, which would provide
enough time for nearby ships to help [Gannon, 1995].
On April 14, 1912, however, the Titanic sideswiped a massive iceberg and
sank in less than three hours. Damaging nearly 300 feet of the ship's hull,
the collision allowed water to flood six of her sixteen major watertight
compartments [Gannon, 1995]. She was on her maiden voyage to the
United States, carrying more than 2200 passengers and crew, when she
foundered. Only 705 of those aboard the Titanic ever reached their
destination [Hill, 1996]. After what seemed like a minor collision with an
iceberg, the largest ship ever built sank in a fraction of the time estimated
for her worst possible accident at sea.
The purpose of this article is to explain the material failures and design
flaws that contributed to the rapid sinking of the Titanic. Specifically,
brittle fracture of the hull steel, failure of the rivets, and flaws in the
watertight compartments will be analyzed. Human factors that contributed
to the sinking will not be reviewed. In addition to the causes for the
sinking, the effects of the disaster are reviewed. As a result of the Titanic
disaster, changes were made in ship design, such as double hulls and
taller bulkheads. Also, stricter standards for safety regulations governing
ships at sea were implemented, including mandatory use of electronic
communication, minimum lifeboat capacities, and the development of the
ice patrol.
The first section of the article is a historical overview of the Titanic
disaster. This section includes statistics on the Titanic and a time line of
the disaster. The next section of the article is a discussion of the material
failures and design flaws that contributed to the rapid sinking of the
Titanic. In the last section, the design changes made to ships and the
safety regulations that have been developed as a result of the Titanic
disaster are explained. The article concludes with a review of the causes
and effects of the rapid sinking of the Titanic. In addition, the conclusion
provides a future perspective on the limitations of the shipbuilding
industry.
 FACTS OF THE CASE
 NAME- RMS Titanic
 OWNER- White Star Line
 OPERATOR- Jack Phillips
 PORT OF REGISTRY-Liverpool
 ROUTE- Southampton to New York City
 COST- GBP 1.5 million
 LAID DOWN-31st march,1909
 LAUNCHED- 31st May,1911
 DECLARED AS SEAWORTHY - 2nd April,1912
 CAPACITY: Passengers-2435 & Crews-892
 DECKS- 9

 LIFE BOATS- 20
 HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
The Titanic was a White Star Line steamship built in the early nineteen
hundreds by Harland and Wolff of Belfast, Ireland. At the time of her
construction, she was the largest moving object ever built. With a weight
of more than 46,000 tons, a length of nearly 900 feet, and a height of more
than 25 stories, she was the largest of three sister ships owned by the
White Star Line [Division, 1997]. The Titanic was also equipped with the
ultimate in turn-of-the-century design and technology, including sixteen
major watertight compartments in her lower section that could easily be
sealed off in the event of a punctured hull. Because of her many safety
features and a comment by her designer that she was nearly unsinkable,
the Titanic was immediately deemed an unsinkable ship [Gannon, 1995].
On April 10, 1912, the Titanic commenced her maiden voyage from
Southampton, England, to New York, with 2227 passengers and crew
aboard [Division, 1997]. The passengers included some of the wealthiest
and most prestigious people at that time. Captain Edward John Smith, one
of the most experienced shipmasters on the Atlantic, was navigating the
Titanic [Rogers and others, 1998]. On the night of April 14, although
the wireless operators had received several ice warnings from others ships
in the area, the Titanic continued to rush through the darkness at nearly
full steam. A time line of the events that followed is shown in Table 1. At
11:35 p.m., the lookouts spotted a massive iceberg less than a quarter of a
mile off the bow of the ship. Immediately, the engines were thrown into
reverse and the rudder turned hard left. Because of the tremendous mass
of the ship, slowing and turning took an incredible distance, more than
that available. At 11:40, without enough distance to alter her course, the
Titanic sideswiped the iceberg, damaging nearly 300 feet of the right side
of the hull above and below the waterline [Gannon, 1995].

Table 1. Timeline of the Sinking of the Titanic [Gannon, 1995].

11:35
Lookouts spot the iceberg 1/4 mile ahead.
p.m.
The Titanic sideswipes the iceberg, damaging
11:40
nearly 300 feet of the hull.
Watertight compartments are filling; water
Midnight begins to spill over the tops of the transverse
bulkheads.
The bow pitches; water floods through anchor-
1:20 a.m.
chain holes.
The bow continues to submerge; propellers lift
2:00
out of the water.
The Titanic tilts 45 degrees or more; the upper
2:10
structure steel disintegrates.
The stern raises up out of the water; the bow,
2:12
filling with water, grows heavier.
Weighing 16,000 tons, the bow rips loose; the
2:18
stern rises to almost vertical.
2:20 The stern slips beneath the surface.
 Coasting at about 13 mph, the bow strikes the
2:29
ocean floor.
Falling at about 4 mph, the stern strikes the
2:56
ocean floor.
The damage caused by the collision allowed water to flood six of the
sixteen major watertight compartments. As water rushed into the starboard
side of the ship's bow, the ship began to tilt down in front and slightly to
the right. By midnight, water in the damaged compartments began to spill
over into others because the compartments were watertight only
horizontally and the walls extended only a few feet above waterline. By
1:20 a.m., water began flooding through anchor-chain holes. Around 2:00,
as the bow continued submerging, the propellers in the stern were lifted
out of the water. Flooding progressed until, at about 2:10, the bow of the
ship was under water and the stern was lifted out of the water almost 45
degrees. Because of the tremendous weight of the three large propellers in
the stern of the ship, the stresses in the ship's midsection increased
immensely as the stern was lifted out of the water. At an angle of 45
degrees or more, the stresses in the midsection exceeded the ultimate
stresses of the steel and the steel failed [Garzke and others, 1994]. Stresses
at failure were estimated at nearly 15 tons per square inch [Gannon,
1995]. What survivors of the disaster then described was a loud noise that
sounded like breaking china or falling equipment [Hill, 1996]. This noise
can be attributed to the tearing and disintegration of the Titanic's upper
structure. By 2:12, with the bow and stern attached by only the inner
bottom structure, the stern angled high out of the water. The bow, dangling
beneath, continued to fill with water. At 2:18, when the bow reached a
weight of about 16,000 tons, it ripped loose from the stern. Free from the
weight of the bow, the stern rose again sharply to an almost vertical
position. Slowly filling with water, the stern began to sink into the water.
At 2:20, the stern slid beneath the surface. Meanwhile, the bow had been
coasting down at about 13 miles per hour (mph). At 2:29, the bow struck
the bottom of the ocean. Falling nearly vertical at about 4 mph, the stern
crashed into the ocean floor 27 minutes later.
The two pieces of the Titanic lie 2,000 feet apart, pointing in opposite
directions beneath 12,500 feet of water. The bow section remains mostly
intact, although the damaged portion of the hull is covered with a 35-foot
high wall of silt and mud that plowed up when the Titanic hit bottom, so
the point of fracture cannot be seen. The stern section is a tangled wreck,
as implosions occurred during the descent due to air trapped within the
 structure succumbing to the increased water pressure at greater depths.
Between the two sections is a wide field of debris [Hill, 1996].
For 73 years, the Titanic remained undisturbed on the ocean floor. On
September 1, 1985, oceanographer Bob Ballard and his crew discovered
the wreck of the Titanic about 350 miles southeast of Newfoundland,
Canada [Gannon, 1995]. Since then, four more expeditions have visited
the Titanic. In 1991, the first purely scientific team visited the site. The
dive was called the Imax dive because the purpose was to create a film for
Imax theaters. The Soviet submersibles used in the dive were capable of
staying submerged for twenty hours and were equipped with 110,000-
lumen lamps. With this equipment, scientists were able to take pictures of
the Titanic wreck and eventually uncover new evidence into the cause of
the Titanic disaster.

CAUSES OF THE RAPID SINKING

On an expedition in 1991 to the Titanic wreck, scientists discovered a
chunk of metal lying on the ocean floor that once was a part of the
Titanic's hull. The Frisbee sized piece of steel was an inch thick with three
rivet holes, each 1.25 inches in diameter [Gannon, 1995]. Since the
retrieval of this piece of steel, extensive research has been done to uncover
additional clues to the cause of the rapid sinking of the Titanic. The
following is a discussion of the material failures and design flaws that
contributed to the disaster.

Material Failures

When the Titanic collided with the iceberg, the hull steel and the wrought
iron rivets failed because of brittle fracture. A type of catastrophic failure
in structural materials, brittle fracture occurs without prior plastic
deformation and at extremely high speeds. The causes of brittle fracture
include low temperature, high impact loading, and high sulphur content.
On the night of the Titanic disaster, each of these three factors was
present: The water temperature was below freezing, the Titanic was
travelling at a high speed on impact with the iceberg, and the hull steel
contained high levels of sulphur.
The Hull Steel. The first hint that brittle fracture of the hull steel
contributed to the Titanic disaster came following the recovery of a piece
of the hull steel from the Titanic wreck. After cleaning the piece of steel,
the scientists noted the condition of the edges. Jagged and sharp, the edges
of the piece of steel appeared almost shattered, like broken china. Also,
the metal showed no evidence bending or deformation. Typical high-
quality ship steel is more ductile and deforms rather than breaks [Gannon,
1995].
Similar behavior was found in the damaged hull steel of the Titanic's sister
ship, Olympic, after a collision while leaving harbor on September 20,
1911. A 36-foot high opening was torn into the starboard side of the
Olympic's hull when a British cruiser broadsided her. Failure of the
riveted joints and ripping of the hull plates were apparent in the area of
impact. However, the plate tears exhibited little plastic deformation and
the edges were unusually sharp, having the appearance of brittle fractures
[Garzke and others, 1994].
Further evidence of the brittle fracture of the hull steel was found when a
cigarette-sized coupon of the steel taken from the Titanic wreck was
subjected to a Charpy test. Used to measure the brittleness of a material,
the Charpy test is run by holding the coupon against a steel backing and
striking the coupon with a 67 pound pendulum on a 2.5-foot-long arm.
The pendulum's point of contact is instrumented, with a readout of forces
electronically recorded in millisecond detail. A piece of modern high-
quality steel was tested along with the coupon from the hull steel. Both
coupons were placed in a bath of alcohol at -1°C to simulate the
conditions on the night of the Titanic disaster. When the coupon of the
modern steel was tested, the pendulum swung down and halted with a
thud; the test piece had bent into a "V." However, when the coupon of the
Titanic steel was tested, the pendulum struck the coupon with a sharp
"ping," barely slowed, and continued up on its swing; the sample, broken
into two pieces, sailed across the room [Gannon, 1995]. Pictures of the
two coupons following the Charpy test are shown in Figure 1. What the
test showed, and the readout confirmed, is the brittleness of the Titanic's
hull steel. When the Titanic struck the iceberg, the hull plates did not
deform. They fractured.

Figure 1. Results of the Charpy test for modern steel and Titanic
steel [Gannon, 1995]. When a pendulum struck the modern steel, on
the left, with a large force, the sample bent without breaking into
pieces; it was ductile. Under the same impact loading, the Titanic
steel, on the right, was extremely brittle; it broke in two pieces with
little deformation.
A microstructural analysis of the Titanic steel also showed the plausibility
of brittle fracture of the hull steel. The test showed high levels of both
oxygen and sulphur, which implies that the steel was semi-kilned low
carbon steel, made using the open-hearth process. High oxygen content
leads to an increased ductile-to-brittle transition temperature, which was
determined as 25 to 35°C for the Titanic steel. Most modern steels would
need to be chilled below -60°C before they exhibited similar behavior.
High sulphur content increases the brittleness of steel by disrupting
the grain structure The sulphur combines with magnesium in the steel to
form stringers of magnesium sulphide, which act as "highways" for crack
propagation. Although most of the steel used for shipbuilding in the early
1900s had a relatively high sulphur content, the Titanic's steel was high
even for the times [Hill, 1996].
The Rivets. The wrought iron rivets that fastened the hull plates to the
Titanic's main structure also failed because of brittle fracture from the
high impact loading of the collision with the iceberg and the low
temperature water on the night of the disaster. Figure 2 shows the Titanic
during her construction, with the riveted hull plates of her stern visible.
With the ship travelling at nearly 25 mph, the contact with the iceberg was
probably a series of impacts that caused the rivets to fail either in shear or
by elongation [Garzke and others, 1994]. As the iceberg scraped along
sections of the Titanic's hull, the rivets were sheared off, which opened up
riveted seams. Also, because of the tremendous forces created on impact
with the iceberg, the rivet heads in the areas of contact were simply
popped off, which caused more seams to open up. Normally, the rivets
would have deformed before failing because of their ductility, but with
water temperatures below freezing, the rivets had become extremely
brittle.

Figure 2. The Titanic in the shipyard during her construction

[Refrigerator, 1998]. Note the hull plates, fastened on all sides to
the ship's main structure by thousands of rivets.
When the iceberg tore through the hull plates, huge holes were created
that allowed water to flood the hull of the ship. As a result, rivets not in
the area of contact with the iceberg were also subjected to incredible
forces. Like a giant lever, the hull plates transferred the inward forces,
applied to the edges of the cracked plates by the water rushing into the
hull, to the rivets along the plate seams. The rivets were then either
elongated or snapped in two, which broke the caulking along the seams
and provided another inlet for water to flood the ship.

Design Flaws

Along with the material failures, poor design of the watertight

compartments in the Titanic's lower section was a factor in the disaster.
The lower section of the Titanic was divided into sixteen major watertight
compartments that could easily be sealed off if part of the hull was
punctured and leaking water. After the collision with the iceberg, the hull
portion of six of these sixteen compartments was damaged, as shown in
Figure 3. Sealing off the compartments was completed immediately after
the damage was realized, but as the bow of the ship began to pitch forward
from the weight of the water in that area of the ship, the water in some of
the compartments began to spill over into adjacent compartments.
Although the compartments were called watertight, they were actually
only watertight horizontally; their tops were open and the walls extended
only a few feet above the waterline [Hill, 1996]. If the transverse
bulkheads (the walls of the watertight compartments that are positioned
across the width of the ship) had been a few feet taller, the water would
have been better contained within the damaged compartments.
Consequently, the sinking would have been slowed, possibly allowing
enough time for nearby ships to help. However, because of the extensive
flooding of the bow compartments and the subsequent flooding of the
entire ship, the Titanic was gradually pulled below the waterline.

Figure 3. A layout of the watertight compartments and the damage

from the collision [Refrigerator, 1998 ]. The thick black lines below
the waterline indicate the approximate locations of the damage to
the hull.

The watertight compartments were useless to countering the damage done

by the collision with the iceberg. Some of the scientists studying the
disaster have even concluded that the watertight compartments
contributed to the disaster by keeping the flood waters in the bow of the
ship. If there had been no compartments at all, the incoming water would
have spread out, and the Titanic would have remained horizontal.
Eventually, the ship would have sunk, but she would have remained afloat
for another six hours before foundering [Gannon, 1995]. This amount of
time would have been sufficient for nearby ships to reach the Titanic's
location so all of her passengers and crew could have been saved.

CONCLUSION
The sinking of the Titanic has become one of the most well known
disasters in history. Because of the terrible loss of life and the demise of
what everyone believed was an "unsinkable" ship, people are intrigued
and curious about what caused the rapid sinking of the Titanic. Several
theories have developed since the sinking to explain the events that
occurred on that fateful night. This article has presented the most probable
theory, which has become dominant as a result of evidence acquired
during several expeditions to the Titanic site.
The failure of the hull steel resulted from brittle fractures caused by the
high sulphur content of the steel, the low temperature water on the night
of the disaster, and the high impact loading of the collision with the
iceberg. When the Titanic hit the iceberg, the hull plates split open and
continued cracking as the water flooded the ship. Low water temperatures
and high impact loading also caused the brittle failure of the rivets used to
fasten the hull plates to the ship's main structure. On impact, the rivets
were either sheared off or the heads popped off because of excessive
loading, which opened up riveted seams. Also, the rivets around the
perimeter of the plates elongated due to the stresses applied by the water,
which broke the caulking and provided another inlet for the water.
The rapid sinking of the Titanic was worsened by the poor design of the
transverse bulkheads of the watertight compartments. As water flooded
the damaged compartments of the hull, the ship began to pitch forward,
and water in the damaged compartments was able to spill over into
adjacent compartments. Not only did the compartments not control the
flooding, but they also contained the water in the bow, which increased
the rate of sinking.
Following the Titanic disaster, double-sided hulls were added to ships to
prevent minor hull punctures from causing major damage. Also, the
transverse bulkheads of the watertight compartments were raised so that
water could not spill over the tops if the ship were pitched at a slight
angle. Safety regulations established after the sinking include the
mandatory use of the wireless for large ships, the minimum lifeboat
capacity equal to the number of passengers and crew aboard, and the
implementation of the ice patrol to warn ships of nearby ice fields.
Understanding the causes for the rapid sinking of the Titanic is necessary
to prevent similar accidents in the future. The changes made in ship design
and safety regulations following the disaster were effective in decreasing
the casualties of accidents at sea. Examples include the successful rescues
of 1600 passengers and crew from the Andrea Doria in 1956, 700
passengers from the Prinsendam in 1980, and all the passengers and crew
from Mikhail Lermentov in 1986 and the Oceanos in 1992 [Garzke and
others, 1994]. Other lessons need to be learned, however. Just because
shipbuilding companies have the technology to build something does not
mean that they should. In the case of the Titanic disaster, the causes for the
sinking indicate that shipbuilding technology was far more advanced than
the understanding which engineers had of the materials they were using to
build the ships.
REFERENCES
1. Division of the History of Technology, Transportation Collections,
National Museum of American History, in cooperation with the
Public Inquiry Mail Service, Smithsonian Institution, "The
Titanic," http://www.si.edu/resource/faq/nmah/titanic.htm(Washingt
on, DC: Smithsonian Institution, May 1997).
2. Gannon, Robert, "What Really Sank the Titanic," Popular
Science, vol. 246, no. 2 (February 1995), pp. 49-55.
3. Garzke, William H., David K. Brown, and Arthur Saniford, "The
Structural Failure of the Titanic," Oceans Conference Record
(IEEE), vol. 3 (1994), pp. 138-148.
4. Hill, Steve, "The Mystery of the Titanic: A Case of Brittle
Fracture?" Materials World,vol. 4, no. 6 (June 1996), pp. 334-335.
5. Manning, George, The Theory and Technique of Ship Design (New
York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1956), pp. 25-53.
6. Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, Principles of
Naval Architecture,4th ed. (New York: The Society of Naval
Architects and Marine Engineers, 1977), pp. 121-133.